Creative storytelling

Back in her native Poland, Sonia Jozajtis’ aunt prepares coffee traditionally. Beans are ground and swirled in hot water. The grounds are allowed to settle. At the table, one then drinks until they reappear on the tongue, coffee and ritual intertwined. Given this background, it’s unsurprising that Jozajtis and the other minds behind High Voltage Seafront Cafe, a pop-up-gone-permanent on the Asbury Park boardwalk, have achieved such a textured vibe. The common denominator here is an intentionality about the coffee, the food, […]

Perhaps no food conveys a sense of place like the oyster. To tip back a Cape May Salt or Forty North Rose Cove and sip its brine is to kiss its native waterway on the lips, in a paraphrase of French poet Léon-Paul Fargue. It is to commune with season and location, a humble creature transformed by salt and time into something far more grand. It is to taste the point where river gives way to sea, the best of […]

To sit with Mikey Azzara for any length of time is to watch his mind at work. You sense that he is zooming in and out between macro- and micro-level details, considering them with equal intensity. He’s a man who thinks before he speaks. This makes sense. For Azzara’s company, Zone 7, to work, obsession with high-level quality and nitty-gritty logistics must collide. That’s because Zone 7 resides squarely in the heart of the Garden State’s food system. Read more… Published […]

As the sun rises over West Philly, a quiet hum of work is under way at the Growing Together Garden at 25th and Reed Streets. Tomorrow is market day at the Nationalities Service Center (NSC), Philly’s largest refugee-resettlement agency, and there’s much to be done. Beets are picked and arranged, bright like gems. Orange, yellow and bright-purple carrots are gathered into bunches. Outside the locked gates of the 2.8-acre expanse, freight trains rumble by and the city awakens. Folks gather […]

This has been a challenging, no good, difficult 2017. Sure, sure, there has been positivity along the way. (Its persistence is shocking, isn’t it?) Yet there have been plenty of just-plain-tough days, too. And when things are low, when they come just shy of bottoming out, there is a dish I return to for solace: The Casserole. Spoken aloud, the words are an incantation. They bring my best friends into the kitchen when I’m pushing against the empty, a lifeboat delivered […]

The action in Asbury Park trends east. Ocean air, boardwalk vibes, and a hot new hotel all help. But lately, locals have been hitting up the rising northwest side to caffeinate. There, Booskerdoo Coffee Company has planted its headquarters just over the tracks, uniting a roastery, bakery, and coffee bar over 2,000 square feet. When you’re used to roasting in an 800-square-foot space shared with a cafe, that’s a mighty upgrade. Read more… Published June 1, 2017

Rose Robson always follows this rule: If a crop crosses her path more than once, she investigates. This is how the fourth-generation farmer discovered pawpaws, a greenish tree fruit that has tropical notes of banana, mango and citrus. First, they came up in a Rutgers organic agriculture class she was visiting. Then she read about them in Modern Farmer. Within a year, Robson had a grove of 90 trees in Wrightstown, which she tends along with flowers, field crops and peaches. […]

The story of Long Beach Island, better known among NJ local as LBI, is a story of the water. As you cross the Route 72 Causeway, the view opens up in stages. There are the salt-marsh homes of Beach Haven West, some still bearing Sandy’s scars. There is the strange absence of the bayman’s shack that used to hold court in the reeds. Finally, the vista opens onto a union of water, land and sky. Even for locals, the landscape strikes […]

Growing up, Ashley Lyons Putman’s lunchbox wasn’t quite like the other kids. When you’re the daughter of organic farmers Jim and Kathy Lyons of Blue Moon Acres, Lunchables don’t make the cut. “So I’d take out this big, black orb,” Ashley says with a laugh. Brown rice balls filled with pickled plum paste were common. While she fared poorly in lunchroom trades, Putman learned about healthy food early on. That made her and her brothers adventurous and mindful eaters. Read more… […]

When Hanaa Al Atmah gathered her four children and walked to the Jordanian border from Daraa, their home city in southwestern Syria where the conflict began, her youngest son Alaa was just an infant. That was back in 2012. By then, war had been raging for some time, eventually finding its way to the family’s doorstep. As for so many, life in Syria had grown too dangerous. There was no choice but to go. Hanaa’s husband Luai fled first, having been […]